CHAPTER XVI

The Future of World Democracy

What is to be the future relation of the Negro peoples to the rest of the world? The visitor from Altruria might see here no peculiar problem. He would expect black folk to develop along the lines of other human races, with perhaps new and interesting differences and variations. In Africa its economic and political development would eventually equal or outrun the ancient glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba; overseas the West Indies would become a new-world Africa, built in the very pathway of the new highways of commerce between East and West—the real sea route to India; in South America a new people mingled of all the chief stocks of men would give the world a new art and social science; while in the United States, a large part of its citizenship (showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but nevertheless equal sharers in and contributors to the civilization of the West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.

This natural assumption of a stranger finds lodging, however, in the minds of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an outcome is usually dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted that tacit but clear modern philosophy which has assigned to the white race alone the hegemony of the world and assumed that other races, and particularly the Negro race, will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out before their all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the African slave trade and of the industrial expansion of Europe during the nineteenth century.

Not only the vast majority of white folk, but Chinese, Indians and Negroes themselves have been so excited, oppressed, and suppressed by current white civilization that they think and judge everything by its terms. They have no norms that are not set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They can conceive of no future world which is not dominated by present white nations and thoroughly shot through with their ideals, their method of government, their economic organization, their literature and their art. To broach before such persons any suggestion of radical change, any idea of intrusion, physical or spiritual, on the part of alien races into this white heaven, is to bring down upon one’s devoted head the most tremendous abuse and contempt.

In this way the preservation of the color bar has been erected into a cardinal principle of modern civilization. Its preservation is threatened today principally by Japan; then by India; then by the Negroes of the United States and West Africa. Japan has attacked the legend of invincible Europe and of a white race of unapproachable ability. Nothing that Europe and Europeans have done, but Japan is doing nearly as well and sometimes better.

On a less striking scale and with less organization, India is beginning to pose similar problems, and despite century-long disunity through caste, religion and domination by foreign powers, there is arising so fixed a determination to build an autonomous Indian state which will affect a vast change in the relation of white and colored people in Asia, that it seems not only possible but probable within the next century.

Leaving aside similar but less obvious movements in black Africa and America, let us turn for a moment to a consideration of the way in which this extraordinary problem of the color line has arisen in an age which has seen the development of liberalism and democracy in the world. Liberalism, freedom of thought and action, revolt against dogma, effort to raise standards of living, came to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ideals of perfect states arose, and coincident with all this, and tremendous in its distorting influence, came the African slave trade.

For four hundred years, labor in Europe had been a matter of serfs and souls; souls to be saved and serfs as an integral part of the farming estate, or as city artisans. This now has changed and the two aspects of labor have been torn apart. Labor became a commodity in a new world; commerce added to the exchange of inanimate goods, the bodies of men whose value lay in their labor. The black African slave trade became an immensely profitable institution because the labor could be applied on an almost endless mass of fertile land. Nor was that all. This land could and did produce a mass of goods, and new goods in the sense that they were not simply luxuries demanded by the rich but necessities wanted in increasing amounts by the poor. Thus there arose and made itself manifest, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the new method of increasing income based on the buying and selling of labor as a commodity. The profit which arose therefrom furnished the first great accumulations of capital goods and was the incentive back of the new invention and technique which startled the world between 1738 and 1830. There were the cotton gin, the steam engine, the flying shuttle, the power loom, and the beginnings of our knowledge of electricity. These things were not the cause of the Industrial Revolution; they were the result of the African slave trade and of the new crops of cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, potatoes, indigo, and what not. A new attitude toward labor was being evolved at the same time that the new democracy was growing.

The slave trade from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century flowed westward as a small, quiet but deepening stream of black labor. It rose to a flood in the eighteenth century, eventually overflowing the market with slaves, decreasing the profits of slavery, increasing the revolt of slaves, revealing the cruelty of this new slavery and giving philanthropy a chance to check it.

For fifty years, beginning with the abolition of the English slave trade and ending with the abolition of slavery in the United States, democracy developed in Europe and the United States in the conscious effort of the laboring classes to equalize income and share in the freedom and power that had come to the new capitalists from the slave trade. But the continuing slavery in America had done something to the world. It had quickened the demand of labor for a voice not only in government but in industry, and at the same time it had made the world regard labor as a saleable commodity. It divided humanity into owners and goods, it made men callous to the sufferings of white men as well as black; to the poverty of white labor, because it was looked upon not as unfortunate and oppressed but inferior and incapable; and with this class of the incapable and inferior were bracketed all members of the darker races.

Henceforth the white labor movement, beginning as mass emancipation, became subtly transformed so as to enable certain individuals and groups of laborers to escape from their poverty and become either better paid laborers or preferably employers and owners. Even in their ranks, the attitude toward the lowest class of labor and toward colored labor was an attitude of indifference and contempt. The dream of new America came to be not the uplift of labor, but the transmutation of poor white laborers into rich employers, with the inevitable residue of the poor white and black eternally at the bottom. In time men became used to the idea that this submerged mass should form not a tenth, but nine-tenths of all men.

It was in vain that the socialists and communists of the latter part of the nineteenth century sought to stress the plight of labor as such. They were appealing to people who had learned for centuries to despise human beings and the utmost that they could accomplish in solidarity of labor action was a more or less faint vision of a higher destiny for some white laborers. Even to this day, the feeling among the masses of white laborers in Europe and America is that the industrial democracy toward which they are striving holds no goal or destiny for the laborers of Asia and Africa.

On the other hand, these dark laborers have become more and more bound up in the same industrial process with white labor. They are employed by the same capital. They come more or less into competition for the kinds of work which they do; their wages can be kept at vastly different levels, but the enhanced profit from this low black wage goes only in part to white labor, even in South Africa, where fear and race hate make an unusual and temporary situation; for the most part, cheap colored labor enhances the power of owners and employers over white labor.

The examination, therefore, of the problems of democracy includes not simply Europe but black Europe, that is, Europe in Africa; European commerce and industry in so far as it involves African materials; and African labor in so far as these materials are produced and consumed in a common world economy by laborers who are increasingly in competition.

In the midst of a critical era following World War and world-wide industrial dislocation, an examination of the future of the hard-won fruits of democratic government must involve the relation of white democracy to the colored peoples of the world. It will not be amiss then to examine the basic thought of democracy in two leading countries which are today not only leaders in democratic development but also, and in curious contradiction, in colonial expansion. Democracy in England is limited in the matters to which it may be applied. In many of the most important matters of modern life, there is little democratic control; for instance, in the determination of the kind of work which men do; in decisions as to the sort and quantity of goods produced and the way in which goods and services are distributed among consumers; in the ownership of property and division of power based on income.

Yet these matters have to do with the primary interests of life. To be sure the English voter may approach these subjects; in matters of minimum limits to wages; in certain conditions of labor; and in relief for unemployment and extreme poverty. He may, through the income tax, redistribute income to some extent. But in the main concerns of industry and income, he has no voice. Moreover, England rules more or less completely over vast numbers of colored laborers; but the English voter has but little opportunity to determine or even to know the methods and objects of this rule.

In most of these matters, outside the present purview of English democracy, it is still said that they are in the realm of private judgment and initiative; yet they touch the most important and vital interests of all Englishmen and are matters today especially of the greatest public concern. That they may come under the control of the voters eventually, no Englishman could deny. But the power to decide what and when democracy in England shall rule lies today outside democracy entirely, and in the hands of a powerful oligarchy. This oligarchy was long an aristocracy of birth, whose power rested on land and privilege. By slow and momentous change, this basis of power became invested capital, with its opportunity for education and social training.

The present British oligarchy is perhaps the most remarkable in the world. It is rich and educated, and it is saved from degeneracy and inbreeding by constant recruiting of ability from all ranks of life in England, its colonies and dependencies, and even from foreign lands. This oligarchy controls democracy and limits its scope.

A largely unexpressed but central thesis of English rule is the conviction that ability, while inherent in the English ruling class, is, outside that class, largely accidental and a sport of nature. This deep-seated belief assumes that present methods of education and opportunity are securing for England a fair maximum of ability, while, in all probability, it is securing a dangerous minimum and thus curtailing and killing the growth of democracy at its very source. Even in England and the white British dominions, the ability and capability of mankind have not begun to be exploited. Today it is largely accident that a Ramsay MacDonald or a Keir Hardie escape jail, asylum or dumb obscurity. A system of broad education for children and adults, an increasing attempt to give wider and wider masses of men the same opportunity to develop strength and ability as is now reserved for the darlings of the gods and a few sports of fate, would in time widen the basis of democracy in England, or rather make it feasible so to broaden the limits of democratic control as to bring under its purview the whole realm of work and wage, wealth and income, production and distribution as well as the welfare of the five hundred million persons whom Great Britain rules today chiefly for the private profit of the English ruling class. Lack of faith in the possibilities of its people—English and white, as well as yellow, brown and black, is the danger of British Democracy.

But it is not mere negative lack of faith in men that limits British democracy—it is the positive demand for income and large income on the part of the English ruling class. Their high scale of expenditure is well-known and world famous. The so-called necessary expense for “comfort” on their part requires for an English family as much in a week as would support a Chinese peasant a year. The ordinary ideal of a well-to-do Englishman is to have an assured income which relieves him of all necessity for work and lets him follow Art or Politics or the life of leisure with assurance; with no temptation of petty graft or bribery, and with liberty to cultivate the amenities of human intercourse.

Thus the British “gentleman” is a type and ideal of what real existence may mean. On his shoulders rest the maintenance of certain standards of conduct and customs of living, and that elusive, but real thing called “sportsmanship.” But all this requires income and regular and certain income in large sums. This has led in the past to slavery and the slave trade, and the Industrial Revolution; and still leads to a ruthless exploiting of large masses of English labor for profit.

When and as the factory legislation and the increasing political power of labor, together with the diminishing returns of investment in England, brought down this rate of profit or threatened to, England turned to forced labor in Africa and coolie labor in Asia and the South Seas. Cheap colored labor thus gradually displaced white English labor, and the British Empire becomes mainly a matter of profitable investment. English labor was long the skilled manipulator of raw material raised by blacks and yellows, until gradually, in China and Japan, colored labor began to enter skilled manufacture and to throw white labor out of employment or reduce their wage.

Brown India and black Africa will eventually follow the same path, under the pressure of the English oligarchy itself and of other peoples, for income based on present industrial control. This prospect arouses labor unrest in England, and the oligarchy must allay it at any cost. It is accepting today a staggering burden of taxation, probably heavier than in any other civilized land, and using the income for doles and other temporary expedients, so as to avoid admitting a further encroachment of democratic control over industry and income.

It is all the easier for England to accomplish this, because the English middle class and the English laborers agree with the ruling class in the fear of allowing primitive and half-civilized peoples and peoples with non-European types of culture, to act and think for themselves and share in their own government. Missionary Christianity and liberalism sought to envisage such a program, but their aims were turned away and their acts made tools of exploitation and despotism by imperial industry. This was made easy not only by the power of ownership, but also by the doubts of liberals and philanthropists themselves. They continued to regard the heathen as a human liability for whom they were sorry. They could not dream of the mass of humanity as a source of power, ability, genius, and enlightening experience. English science in the hands of Galton and Pearson and their ilk made English aristocracy rulers by divine right. The vast possibility of a pool of human knowledge as wide as the living world never arrested their attention. They could not imagine that the freedom and development of all men would make in time a world Renaissance, beside which the little European Renaissance would seem small and petty; that art and science could look forward to greater and more wonderful conquests, if they contemplated using the ability of all the world and not simply a narrow section.

Even the possibility of any such world vision had to be smashed in its very beginning by those satisfied by present conditions. Only for a moment, in the United States of America in 1867, when four million black slaves had enfranchisement and the possibility of economic power added to their legal freedom, did the world trend set toward universal democratic development regardless of race and color. Organized industry girded its loins. It swiftly nullified the Negro vote. It quickly warned Europe with terrible fiction concerning American Reconstruction. And in the meantime in both America and Europe capital set its house in order for a new conquest of the world.

Much that is true of England in the working of democracy is also true of France, but there are certain striking differences. Intellectual freedom of the French is unparalleled in the modern world, and draws the criticism and envy of those groups and nations which do not dare to let men think. There is consequently in French intellectual life an anarchy and enthusiasm, a variety and inventiveness which would spell continual renaissance and undying renewal of life, were it not for one thing which is the tragedy of France—and that is war. For a thousand years France has been baptized in blood. Hardly an effort at culture, upbuilding, government by dictator, aristocracy or democracy has been attempted but it has been frustrated, spoiled, or misdirected by mass murder; by wars, civil and foreign, wars of aggression and defense.

These two things: intelligence and intellectual freedom on the one hand, and war on the other, explain France more than anything else; explain a spiritual expansion toward a universal soul, handicapped by a defense mechanism which makes the individual Frenchman not only thrifty, greedy, and suspicious, but the perfect victim of an organization of wealth and industry unsurpassed in the modern world for power, cunning, and ruthless will to rule. French industry knows no national boundaries and no national patriotism. It is aligned with German industry, Russian, and Italian; and its exploitation of Africa has at times and in certain areas been unsurpassed in English Kenya or the Belgian Congo. All of the latest paraphernalia of organized industry for securing its power originated or was perfected in France: the Trust and the Cartel; arranged and purchased Publicity; graft and widespread bribery; ownership of the public press and ownership of government officials; not to speak of corporations for every human activity encircling the world.

The French laboring classes have led labor thought in the world and still do. It was by no accident that Karl Marx sought sanctuary in France and incubated there his “Communist Manifesto.” It is natural that all socialist thought and movement should have been started and developed in France. French labor has never completely envisaged the color bar to which English labor is so willingly nailed. The labor vote in France has been the backbone of French democracy; and yet in the endeavor of the mass of Frenchmen to exercise democratic control upon French policies and to attack the very centers and main depositories of human power today, that is, the direction of industry, the production of wealth and its distribution—these efforts have come repeatedly to naught.

This weakness of French democracy has come from two facts: first, the Revolution made the French peasant a small, jealous reactionary landholder instead of forcing him into a group with interests bound up in a national land patrimony; secondly, the French industrial worker, despite his trade unions, his socialistic and even communistic idealogy, has not been able to cope with organized industrial control. He has forced the political leaders further to the left than in any modern country save Russia, but whenever, by political force, labor has time and time again threatened political revolution, it has been held back by the threat of war, which was not simply possible but actual.

The French laborer has had to fight organized industry in England, Germany and Austria, leading against France the very laborers to whom France had given ideals of European solidarity; and, against this onslaught, French labor in modern times has had to accept the leadership of organized ability furnished by French industry and has had to pay its price, which was lip service to socialism, and industry organized for war, and exploitation for the sake of private profit.

Moreover, the paradox of French democracy is to produce not only the strife and difference of opinion which arise from intelligence and are seen in the parliamentary blocs which rightly displace artificial attempts to align thought in two or even three parties, but also by its very efforts at enlightenment and education, to evoke out of the educated masses, a leadership which misleads them. Thus French labor has educated its children to furnish the most efficient leaders for French capital, and correspondingly to weaken the labor masses and strengthen industrial forces.

What now is going to happen, not only to Africans but to Europeans when such democratic organization is made the master of African industry and development? We need not stop here to evaluate the influence of democracy in Belgium, Holland and Portugal; in Scandinavia, Russia and the United States. The imagination of Belgium is so overwhelmed with its immense colonial wealth that no inner democracy can soon change it. The black Congo supports and enriches Belgium. Holland has allowed her democracy to yield in her colonial empire to an increased division of wealth with colored labor and to a vision of still larger future increase; but she is still fattening on her colonies and her future course depends on world democracy. Scandinavia is prosperous through her alliance with colonial powers and fascist governments. She buys of them and sells to them at a profit and divides that profit more equitably among her laboring classes than most democracies; but she does not investigate the ultimate sources of that profit or greatly care. Russia has made gestures toward colored labor, but the unfortunate reaction of Chinese leadership toward European capitalism and the still more unfortunate triumph of state capitalism in Japan, with stern repression of mass control, has left Russia helpless and almost complacent in the face of the problem of the darker workers of the world.

In America we have a democracy which has almost surrendered not simply to the rule of wealth, but to the domination of race prejudice. There are democratic forces at work here, but they are largely in such opposition as to be self-destroying. You cannot have a growing labor movement and increased democratic control of industry in New England and the Middle West coincident with farm serfdom and pauperized labor in the South. And it is the South today that through its rotten boroughs dominates not only the nation but even the liberal element of the nation. The burden of democracy rests, therefore, on Europe and on Europe in Africa.

Colonial imperialism in Europe includes not simply democratic England and France but also fascist Italy and, in prospect, Hitler’s Germany. These states make no bones nor excuse for their colonial objects. Germany bases her whole state philosophy on the domination, not only of white people over colored people, but of certain strains of white blood over all others; and her demand for restoration of her colonies is a demand for cheap forced labor and political and economic domination. There are indications that this demand will be granted at least in part by England and France, in return for a restoration of peaceful world conditions which will allow industry to organize for further profit in Africa and Asia.

This is proved by the case of Italy and Ethiopia. The Negus of Abyssinia chose to put his energy into modernizing and organizing his state, rather than into war and defense, and he followed in this matter the advice and criticism of the best thought of Europe and America. Despite this and at the demand of Italy for increased material resources and cheap black labor, both France and England yielded or gave half-hearted opposition. Abyssinia fell before an onslaught carefully prepared and known to the world long before actual hostilities, and we are now facing the veiled and hidden process by which two thousand years of independence of a primitive people is by force and European capital going to be subjected to a systematic exploitation for the profit of Italy. This adds to the burden of European democracy in Africa.

How far can white Europe continue to dominate black Africa for its own selfish ends? When one thinks of any possible trial of strength in Africa, it is natural for white Europe to place its present faith on the strength of its technical superiority in war as shown so strikingly by Italy in Ethiopia. On the other hand, there are certain things to remember: so far as Africa has been conquered by white Europe, this has been mainly by means of black soldiers, and Africa is held in subordination today by black troops. This could be partially ignored before the World War, but even then Great Britain had the King’s African Rifles in British East Africa, the West African Frontier Force in British West Africa; and she conquered the Sudan and East Africa with black troops. The Germans in East Africa and the Cameroons had about eight thousand native military and police. In French Africa there were thirty thousand native troops and police. The Portuguese, Italians and Spanish depended on Negro guards and police, and Leopold organized and dominated the Congo by putting despotic power in the hands of the wilder tribes with a twelve year military service.

During the World War the need of Negro troops was evident; not only were Sudanese troops used in Asia and Asia Minor, but the German colonies of Tanganyika, Cameroons and Togoland were conquered by black troops fighting against black troops. Hundreds of thousands of American Negroes and West Indian Negroes took part in the war, and ten thousand soldiers and ten thousand porters were sent from British West Africa to the East African campaign. In Kenya the King’s African Rifles was expanded to over twenty thousand men and over one hundred thousand natives in Nyasaland were employed as soldiers and porters. The Germans in East Africa recruited eleven thousand six hundred natives and during the first year of the war seventy thousand black troops were raised in French West Africa. By 1918 black Africa had furnished France six hundred and eighty thousand soldiers and two hundred thirty-eight thousand laborers or nine hundred and eighteen thousand men in all. General Smuts made his celebrated pronouncement in 1917:

“We have seen, what we have never known before, what enormously valuable military material lay in the Black Continent. You are aware of the great German scheme which existed before the war, and which no doubt is still in the background of many minds in Germany, of creating a great Central African Empire which would embrace not only the Cameroons and East Africa, but also the Portuguese Colonies and the Congo—an extensive area which would have a very large population and would not only be one of the most valuable tropical parts of the world, but in which it would be possible to train one of the most powerful black armies of the world. We were not aware of the great military value of the natives until this war. This war has been an eye-opener in many new directions. It will be a serious question for the statesmen of the Empire and Europe, whether they are going to allow a state of affairs like that to be possible, and to become a menace, not only to Africa, but perhaps to Europe itself.”¹

After the war, the French frankly announced their policy of incorporating black men in their army. That is the physical force which today buttresses and protects the French nation. French West African troops are divided into twenty regiments of two thousand each and these are stationed in French Algiers and Morocco and in Syria as well as in Europe. “Through the aid of Senegalese troops, France built up and today holds an empire which probably never would have been won by European soldiers.”

With the modern emphasis on history, it is easy to forget that Africa, without mention of her own civil strife, has been literally bathed in blood at the behest of Europe. Not only was there the decimation due to the African slave trade, but there were eleven Zulu wars in South Africa from 1659 to 1893; there were seven wars of the English against Ashanti; there were the wars around Benin and the French war in Dahomey and other parts of West Africa; there was the English attack on Ethiopia and in the Sudan and the rise of the Madhi; there were repeated rebellions as the English and Germans entered East Africa, to say nothing of the fights in Egypt, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco, and the sporadic rebellions in French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo and German Southwest Africa. There was the Italian slaughter in Tripoli, Eritrea and Abyssinia.

There is nothing in economic history that quite parallels the mass suicide of the Ama Xosa. Between the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Relief of Lucknow, a prophet rose in South Africa and appealed with every cadence of tongue and billowing of emotion to the faith and religion and hope of fighting black thousands. He told them God would drive these white oppressors into the sea and bring back the great heroes of the Kafir nations, if only they would sacrifice to heaven the blood of their cattle, their most dearly prized and venerated possession. The Xosa rose en masse and slaughtered their cattle by the thousand. The cry of their hurt and the stench of their flesh swept over the veldt; and famine fell—a hundred thousand black men starved.

In our day, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there have been small revolts all over Africa. The revolt in the Belgian Congo in 1904 and 1906; the riot in Dahomey in 1923; the mutiny on the Ivory Coast in 1923 and 1924; the revolt of the Senussi in 1916; the turmoil in the French Congo in 1928; that other earlier revolt in 1904, when after the massacre of one thousand five hundred natives, a tribe arose killing and eating twenty-seven traders; the revolt of Harry Thuku in Kenya in 1922; the mutiny of black Sudanese troops under English officers and the riots by former Gordon College boys; the riot of Port Alice, South Africa, in 1920; at Bloemfontein in 1925, and Durban in 1929; the revolt of the Wahee against the Germans in 1891; the Magi-Magi in East Africa in 1905; the wiping out of the Herero; in Southwest Africa, the disgraceful massacre in Uganda by Catholics, Protestants, Mohammedans and natives; the hut-tax rebellion in Sierra Leone in 1894, which lasted three months and in which a thousand British subjects lost their lives; the Zulu rebellion in 1906. One might extend this record indefinitely. In some cases few were killed and in some cases thousands; but the total loss of life was immense.

To this have been added strikes; the strike of the railway workers in Sierra Leone in 1896; the native strike in South Africa in 1913, the strike of workers on the docks and in the mines in 1919 and 1920, and especially the organization of the ICU, a desperate attempt in the face of the law to bring together unskilled workers in one big union and finance a general strike of the black workers of South Africa.

Today the number of armed black troops in Africa, designed to hold the continent in the control of white Europe, is at least two hundred fifty thousand, in addition to a large number of police. There are less than ten thousand white officers and troops regularly in Africa, aside from the recent Italian invasion. Suppose that led by these trained soldiers and armed by the revolt of white labor in Europe and America, the black mass of Africa once rose in rebellion!

Meantime, Africa has become for the most part a land of bitter color discrimination, fading out toward the French North and intensifying toward South Africa. All through Africa the discrimination between white and black, based mainly on color, is manifest. The Bantu proverb has it: “The white man’s envy forbids us the red clay, although he does not paint himself.” While the Union was refusing to give the natives adequate land, it set aside nearly five million acres as a reserve for wild animals. And finally one may notice the bitter comments made on the hypocrisy of Europeans who claim to be Christian. The Union Parliament which passed the Color Bar Act inserted in the constitution the clause: “The people of South Africa acknowledge the sovereignty and guidance of Almighty God.”

This racial bitterness in the southern third of the continent is less manifest in Portuguese Africa but intensified in Kenya; it smolders in the Belgian Congo and in French Equatorial Africa, but reaches perhaps its most critical stage in British West Africa, where a class of Negroes has arisen who will not always submit to caste. As one author has said, “On the coast, in the forests, and along the rivers of Africa, State meets State, and the effect of the clash of those meetings falls both socially and economically on the populations of those States far off in Europe. These populations, through their policy, their desires and beliefs, are sowing in African forests, but they reap sometimes in European cities and sometimes even upon European battlefields. We cannot therefore ignore the possibility that by sowing dragons’ teeth in Africa we may reap a most bloody crop of armed men in Europe as well as a most lucrative rubber crop in Africa.”

It is, of course, too much to expect that a program of utter altruism toward African natives can be immediately substituted for the extreme individual selfishness of profit-making investment; but that gradually such a substitution must be made is as clear as day. “For two or three generations,” said Lord Lugard, “we can show the Negro what we are: then we shall be asked to go away. Then we shall have to leave the land to those it belongs to.”

Finally, one cannot forget the reciprocal influence of labor and its treatment in Africa on labor in Europe and America, and one must ask how far democratic government is going to be possible in a world supported to a larger and larger degree by products from a continent like Africa, and governed by the industrial caste which owns Africa. There is here a paradox and a danger that must not be overlooked.

It seems clear today that the masses of men within and without civilization are depressed, ignorant and poor chiefly because they have never had a chance; because they have lacked inspiring contacts; because the results of their labor have been taken from them; because the opportunity to know the facts of human life has never been presented to them, and because disease and crime have been made easier than health and reason.

For centuries the world has sought to rationalize this condition and pretend that civilized nations and cultured classes are the result of inherent and hereditary gifts rather than climate, geography and happy accident. This explanation, which for years was supported by the phenomenal onrush of European culture, is today, because of the decline and fall of this hegemony, less widely believed; and whatever mankind has accomplished through the ages and in many modern regions of the world, is beginning to be looked upon as forecast and promise of what the great majority of human beings can do, with wider and deeper success, if mere political democracy is allowed to widen into industrial democracy and the democracy of culture and art.

The possibility of this has long been foreseen and emphasized by the socialists, culminating in the magnificent and apostolic fervor of Karl Marx and the communists; but it is hindered and it may be fatally hindered today by the relations of white Europe to darker Asia and darkest Africa; by the persistent determination in spite of the logic of facts and the teaching of science, to keep the majority of people in slavish subjection to the white race; not simply to feed and clothe them and administer to their comfort, but to submerge them with such useless and harmful luxury that the effort of their rich to get richer is making civilization desperately poor.

Poverty is unnecessary and the clear result of greed and muddle. It spawns physical weakness, ignorance, and dishonesty. There was a time when poverty was due mainly to scarcity, but today it is due to monopoly founded on our industrial organization. This strangle hold must be broken. It can be broken not so much by violence and revolution, which is only the outward distortion of an inner fact, but by the ancient cardinal virtues: individual prudence, courage, temperance, and justice, and the more modern faith, hope and love. Already the working of these virtues has increased health, intelligence, and honesty, despite poverty; and further increase is only thwarted by the blind and insane will to mass murder which is the dying spasm of that decadent exploitation of human labor as a commodity, born of the Negro slave trade; and this attitude is today strengthened and justified by persistent disbelief in the ability and desert of the vast majority of men. The proletariat of the world consists not simply of white European and American workers but overwhelmingly of the dark workers of Asia, Africa, the islands of the sea, and South and Central America. These are the ones who are supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury, and extravagance. It is the rise of these people that is the rise of the world. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.